Tag Archives: michele curtis

At Seattle Dance Project, Jason Ohlberg Muses on Joy and Death

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© Tim Summers
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Timothy Lynch (Photo: © Tim Summers)

Alexandra Dickson with the Seattle Dance Project troupe (Photo: © Tim Summers)

Jason Ohlberg (Photo: © Tim Summers)

Timothy Lynch and Betsy Cooper (Photo: © Tim Summers)

Christopher Montoya soars over Iyun Harrison (Photo: © Tim Summers)

Betsy Cooper (Photo: Zebravisual)

Michele Curtis (Photo: Zebravisual)

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The Project Six (at ACT Theatre through March 30) program is a little shorter than anticipated (a third work had to be dropped due to a dancer’s injury), but it still makes for a fully satisfying evening of dance. The two works by choreographer Jason Ohlberg, Departure from 5th and Gloria, reward close attention: They’re often protean exercises that photography, in registering the apex of a pose, misrepresent.

Ohlberg’s dance rarely finds a resting place, unless it’s on the floor. Port de bras keeps upper bodies in near-constant motion. The Seattle Dance Project troupe skews toward ex-ballet, so they can meet these demands without the stage degenerating into windmilling arms. The degeneration in Departure from 5th is its theme. Incorporating dancer interviews conducted by John Carroll (Ohlberg edited them down), the work meditates on the effects of being “not good enough” — whether that’s the shape of the body, or a judgement about skill.

It opens with a guest trio of Fates (Irene E. Beausoleil, Narissa Herndon, Micaela Taylor) sweeping through the space in marmoreal gowns by Carol Franklin, their arms sickling like a scythe. They reappear throughout the piece, moving dancers around the stage with a hand lightly held on the nape of a neck.

Each SDP dancer has a sort of soliloquy that shows them off as they criticize, light-heartedly or more seriously, the narcissism inculcated in their younger selves.

Betsy Cooper elevates from floorwork to jumps. Alexandra Dickson may rue her “sturdy legs,” but her footwork is clean and snappy; Michele Curtis is another exponents of a technique so honed it can seem machine-like. Timothy Lynch extends his left foot, toes tucked, and pirouettes, as his voiceover recalls working to perfect that. Iyun Harrison wrestles with the heterosexist “princely” physique he embodies, while Christopher Montoya recalls trying to dance “taller.” (In fact, he possesses an outsized, charismatic courtliness.)

A ballroom dance interlude breaks up the rigor with a group grapevine, shimmies, and hip shakes. Dancers love to dance, even as the lights (by Peter Bracilano) dim, and the Fates cut across the stage with a sheet, enveloping everyone. It’s an engaging, multifaceted work. Ohlberg can be a little too fond of port de bras here — its impact is less when it’s everywhere at once — and he too often leaves dancers in configurations where they must dodge another dancer as they hurry to the next place. But on second viewing, it’s just as affecting.

Gloria, set to Vivaldi, is a fast-moving sequence of shorter dances tied together by gestures that run through the work like threads in a tapestry. There’s Dickson’s cocked elbow; the ensemble with palms together, arms rising up; a repeated drop to the floor in a faint (sleep, or temporary death — they revive). Ohlberg and Montoya lift Lynch — all in a peasant-y brown– aloft. Lynch stands with one arm raised, index finger pointing up to heaven. The women slap their thighs to a common beat, and trade it to the men. Then Betsy Cooper arrives, running forward, managing to seem completely, utterly present. Ohlberg has a beautiful, athletic solo in the glare of an overhead spot (Bracilano’s lighting, again), then a quartet forms, and then the full company reassembles for “Gloria in Excelsis,” against a bright-yellow projection background. The women kneel, and then Cooper, alone, walks slowly upstage as the lights dim. It’s celebratory of a life in dance, and of the communal and spiritual feelings that takes your attention off yourself, toward the shared or transcendent experience. When it’s done, you want to hit Repeat, though SDP’s sweaty troupe would have been hard-pressed to follow through.

Seattle Dance Project’s 5th Program Takes on Brahms & Body Image

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Michele Curtis in Jason Ohlberg's Departure from 5th (Photo: Zebravisual)

Iyun Harrison in Penny Hutchinson's Liebe, Lust Und Liede (Photo: Zebravisual)

ALexandra Dickson with David Alewine and Timothy Lynch in Departure from 5th (Photo: Zebravisual)

David Alewine and Iyun Harrison in Ohlberg's Departure from 5th (Photo: Zebravisual)

Michele Curtis and Timothy Lynch in Kent Stowell's B6 (Photo: Zebravisual)

Alexandra Dickson and Betsy Cooper in Molissa Fenley's Planes in Air (Photo: Zebravisual)

Ezra Dickinson in Penny Hutchinson's  Liebe, Lust Und Liede (Photo: Zebravisual)

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Since the stepping down of co-founder Julie Tobiasson, Timothy Lynch has become sole artistic director of Seattle Dance Project, but there’s certainly been no step off  in artistic energies — that’s in part due to new collaborations and new dancers with the troupe.

Project 5 (performed again this weekend at ACT, and if you have a $25 ACT Pass, make use of it) brings a guest appearance by Inverse Opera, premieres from choreographers Penny Hutchinson and Jason Ohlberg, and three new dancers: Iyun Harrison, Ezra Dickinson, and Gavin Larsen, who join Lynch, Michele Curtis, Alexandra Dickson, Betsy Cooper, and David Alewine.

Who am I to disagree with Sandra Kurtz, when she calls out the success of Hutchinson’s Liebe, Lust und Liede? So I won’t. Hutchinson is a founding member of the Mark Morris Dance Company, which is at this point in modern dance a lot like being a Knight of the Round Table. Using Brahms’ Liebeslieder waltzes — which in turn employ lyrical poetic outcries sung live by Inverse Opera — Hutchinson stages a formal dinner party where the tensions of love and attraction refuse to remain subtextual. (Regan McClellan’s set features a dining table upstage right that turns into a minimalist forest as passions grow wilder.)

The course of love never runs true, and Hutchinson lays out the dance on diagonals, frequently, using the greater distance to emphasize couples pulling apart or being drawn together. It’s great to see younger dancer Ezra Dickinson in this more formal context; Dickinson could easily pass for a cast member on The Big Bang Theory, but he’s properly starched up here, at least at first, before succumbing to the waltz’s passion. Project 5 is worth seeing twice for this dance alone, as Hutchinson’s dining room intrigues create endlesss opportunities for solos, duets, and ensembles (everyone shines, but I was struck by both David Alewine’s and Gavin Larsen’s performances).

Ohlberg’s Departure from 5th assembles a few of my favorite things: musings about the wisdom of experience, decrepitude, and music by Rufus Wainwright and Arvo Pärt. I’ve seen dancers narrate as they do their life’s work before, but it’s never stopped being affecting to me to hear about the personal struggle-decision to dance, perhaps because ballet dancers especially confront their own mortality earlier than most, as they find that the physical demands of professonal ballet surpass their abilities often in their thirties. (The Wainwright song? “Do I Disappoint You?”)

Here, interviews with the dancers are played as they perform, and so you hear about body images, perfectionism, technique, while the same dancer mutely gestures and moves about the stage. In the muscular, sculpted Iyun Harrison’s segment, danced with David Alewine, he talks about the tensions in looking like the heterosexist ballet “prince” as a gay man; Alexandra Dickson recalls the time her child’s legs were pronounced “sturdy.” Throughout, they are occasionally guided by gowned “Fates,” who near the end, pull a silvery sheet over the dancers like a high-thread-count scythe. It’s a wrenching visual, if you’re in the right (or wrong) space.

Also on the program are three previously performed favorites. First, Molissa Fenley’s Planes in Air, this time performed by Betsy Cooper and Alexandra Dickson. If you’re ever feeling blasé about dance, go see Betsy Cooper perform something, anything. In Planes, she finds a serenely exuberant place to go, supported by the way Fenley balances the ungainly and graceful of the winged body (each dancer holds a large white paper fan that is at times an extension of their arms, and at times partner in a spiritual pas de deux).

Edwaard Liang’s To Converse Too gets even better expression this time around than at its premiere. Set to Bach cello suites, it requires so much of the dancers in knotty little interludes, passages with unusual holds and exits, that they are nonetheless supposed to slip through as if buttered. The ensemble of Harrison, Lynch, Cooper, Curtis, and Dickinson pulled it off, mostly, with a refreshingly go-for-broke attitude that gave things a high-wire thrill.

In its own way, Kent Stowell’s B6 is also a high-wire act. It shows off  “old pros” Lynch and Curtis in sizzling formal wear, and asks them to dance a pas de deux with the fierceness and panache of a tango. Lynch and Curtis are the kind of dancers who try never to let you see them sweat, so to speak, but I thought I could see the dancers straining a bit in the bravura displays of ballet strength in slow-motion en pointe pirouettes. It probably should come with an intermission both before and after, or, failing that, bionic tendons.